Negative Space - Lilly Dancyger
Product Details:
Paperback: 278 pages
ISBN-13: 9781951631031
About the Book:
Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges?
Dancyger’s father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away.
As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she’d created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father’s work to find the truth of who he really was.
A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own.
About the Author:
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger, and her writing has been published by Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Playboy, Glamour, Longreads, The Rumpus, and more. She lives in New York City. Find her at lillydancyger.com.
“Selected as a “Most Anticipated Title of 2021” by Literary Hub, Refinery29, Electric Lit, Poets & Writers, and many others. Also selected by USA Today as “one of five books not to miss” and listed as the number one “Best New Book in May” by Bustle!”
“This striking memoir does what an outstanding memoir should: It not only encourages its readers to explore their pasts from new perspectives, but models the bravery needed to gaze behind the curtain of memory and face whatever realities you may find there.”
“Much like her father had, Dancyger crafts a striking composition out of found objects, a poignant portrait of the identities we construct out of grief.”
“An exquisitely intimate unveiling of not only her father, but of her mother and herself. The language is elegant, precise, boney with wisdom and devotion. Each sentence is a finely wrought work of art unto itself.”
“In this heartfelt and sometimes shocking memoir, a woman sets out to learn about her parents and instead discovers herself. Lilly Dancyger grew up in New York’s bohemian ’90s East Village as the daughter of acclaimed sculptor Joe Schactman; she remembers loving it. Dancyger knew that her folks were both heroin addicts, and that the drug was the reason she lost her beloved dad when she was just 12 years old. But only upon looking back at the chaos of her parents’ world does Dancyger start to accept just how less-than-perfect her childhood really was. It’s tricky for a writer to truthfully present two selves—carefree child and wounded adult—but every line of this wise memoir hits hard. Dancyger pulls no punches about the dirty secrets of the arts community her father called home. But despite all the darkness in Negative Space, it reads like a testament to the power of family love.”
“Negative Space is a brilliant and captivating memoir about love, loss, and living a creative life. Artwork, photos, and beautifully written prose come together to create a compelling and dynamic memoir.”
“Dancyger’s illustrated and reported memoir manages to be so many wonderful and heartbreaking things at once. With empathy and gorgeous prose, Dancyger excavates, explores, and attempts to understand her father—a brilliant artist and addict—as he was: flawed, complicated, and so very, very loved.”
“Dancyger is an extraordinary writer, and her bravely introspective memoir will blow you away.”
“Dancyger’s eye for detail and devoted pursuit of grim truths make this an enthralling read. By shining light into the dark corners of her family’s past, she creates a brilliant and gut wrenching memoir.”
“Using images and text, NEGATIVE SPACE shows us the New York art scene of the 1980’s and the author’s late father—but neither are ghosts here. They are written with full splendor, tenderness, and possibility. Exploring her artistic legacy, Dancyger confronts what it means to create and build meaning from absence. Candid, thrilling, wickedly smart, NEGATIVE SPACE is one of the greatest memoirs of this, or any, time.”
“[Dancyger] meticulously examines the raw, nervy exit wounds her artist father created when he died in 2000. What begins as an unimaginable loss is transmuted into an unforgettable story about love, artistic influence, addiction, and legacy. ”
“A searing portrait of grief and anger that you won’t be able to put down.”
“The writing style of Negative Space is not calm water. Rather it is a mad river...both a literary work and an exhibition. Through this memoir, Dancyger has created a gift of immortality for her departed father.”
“Dancyger’s bravery in the face of negative revelations about her dad is admirable. She wants the whole truth, no matter how painful it is to reopen these wounds. Dancyger knew little about Schactman’s addiction when she was young, and she knew nothing about his sometimes abusive relationships with women. But in Negative Space, Dancyger allows her father to be an imperfect and much loved person—her idol still, but a troubled and complicated one.”
“Negative Space is a significant debut. Using her exceptional journalistic skills, Dancyger recounts the indelible life of Joe Schactman, her father, an artist and a heroin addict, who died when she was 12. Dancyger’s dexterous usage of time functions as a critical lens, panning in, out, and around, keeping memory fluid.”
“It’s a reckoning with her family history, an account of the 1980s east village art scene, a coming-of-age story, and a story of her own growth as writer. It’s also a beautiful tribute to her father’s art and the metaphors that held it together. The book’s prints of his artwork add to the haunting beauty of this gorgeous memoir.”
“Dancyger has a powerful story to tell, both about her father and herself. Negative Space is very well written and is an easy read, despite being packed with often-wrenching emotion. Years in the making, it’s the epitome of a labor of love, and it shows.”
“This fierce, intimate work explores the ways in which we construct identities for the people with whom we’re closest, and how we must eventually look beyond those constructs in order to see the world the way it really is... ”
“As she travels the past picking up remnants and clues from her father’s art and life, Dancyger brings to form new stories of family and identity as their own works of art. Negative Space is a beautiful restoration act.”
“Negative Space is a lovely and heartbreaking book; navigating pain, inheritance, and loss. Dancyger’s father emerges from these pages as vividly as if I’d known him…”
“[Negative Space] rejects traditional expectations of closure, instead confidently examining the dual nature of parent-child relationships, creative legacy, and artistic creation as an act of communion.”
“Negative Space a penetrating, heartfelt story, one which plunges into the rippling depths of grief and remembrance only to change us for the better.”
“Readers acquire a love and respect for both Schactman’s work as well as the author’s.”
“An expansive and profoundly moving story.”
“Negative Space is made of a daughter’s love, a detective’s quest, and a true wordsmith’s gift of beautiful prose. Dancyger pursues the clues left behind by her father in the provocative, often disturbing artwork he made, clues not only to his mind but to the central mysteries of her life. Her story itself becomes provocative, harrowing–and deeply moving. This book is a true accomplishment, one that often left me stunned and disturbed in all the right ways, all the ways brilliant art does. In writing about her artist father, Dancyger has herself created a work of art.”
“In Negative Space, Dancyger achieves that beautiful, often elusive, balance of writing about addiction with equal parts examination and empathy. Unraveling the missing facts about her father’s life, addiction, and death, through memory, investigation, and his art, she writes with an eye to understanding that we are all more than one “thing,” that parents are humans first and parents second, that people in the throes of addiction are multi-dimensional. As someone who struggled with heroin addiction for many years, as her father did, the care with which she told this story is exquisite. At turns heartbreaking, reflective, and light, I tore through this book and, when I was done, found myself returning to pages I had marked, passages I had underlined, because the story unfolds in layers, just like life does.”
“This book is so many things: a daughter’s heartrending tribute, a love story riddled by addiction, a mystery whose solution lies at the intersection of art and memory. Together, they form a chorus that I could not turn away from, and didn’t wish to. Like all great works, like those of the author’s father, this book resists description but articulates something profound—about grief, art, and love—that could not have been communicated in any other way.”
“The East Village art scene of the 1980s and 1990s is currently having a cultural resurgence, with painter and activist David Wojnarowicz the subject of a high-profile retrospective and a documentary in recent years. Lilly Dancyger’s memoir Negative Space offers a unique perspective on this world — her father, Joe Schactman, was part of the scene. Dancyger’s book memorably explores questions of creativity, addiction and familial legacies.”